The Sheffield Multilingual City Initiative

The initiative has a full-time co-ordinator and works with partnerships across the city and has two broad aims:

• to promote and strengthen existing bilingualism
• to encourage bilingualism in the monolingual community.

To address the first aim, the initiative works closely with the community schools. The community schools offer mother tongue classes after school or at the weekend. This work represents a huge, and largely unrecognised, volunteer effort by the communities and is extremely important in terms of maintaining cultural identity, self esteem, connections with community elders and "back home". It is also vital in terms of raising achievement and making possible high order literacy skills in English.

Sheffield Children's Centre singing in Spanish at the Celebration of Languages

The support offered is for the management of the schools, curriculum resources, class management, fund raising and liaison with the mainstream.

The second aim is addressed by different partnerships working to put MFL programmes (including mother tongue) into early years centres, primary schools, employee training and lifelong learning.

Denby Street children have an English tea for their Spanish volunteers

Underpinning all the work of the MLC initiative is work on the International Dimension. We belong to a European network of 18 cities and through this have developed numerous international projects. We are looking increasingly at North-South linking.

The initiative works closely with bodies such as CILT and the Central Bureau. MLC runs training programmes on language issues and on education and the international dimension.

Diversity

Sheffield's schools have pupils from a wide range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The total number of bilingual students in the city's schools is 6320* which represents 8.9% of all pupils.

Altogether there are approximately 61 languages spoken by pupils in Sheffield which illustrates the rich linguistic heritage that pupils have. The top seven languages are:

• Panjabi
• Arabic
• Bangla
• Somali
• Creole
• Cantonese
• Pushto

There are slightly more bilingual pupils concentrated at Nursery and Primary schools at 9%, compared with secondary schools which have 8.5%. 9.4% of all pupils in Special schools are bilingual. The ethnic origin of the two major minority ethnic groups are of Pakistani and Caribbean heritage.

Byron Wood School receiving their European Languages Award from Baroness Blackstone

More recently as a result of the government's policy of dispersal, Sheffield has welcomed asylum seekers and refugee families into its schools.

*Based on Sheffield Schools Languages Survey 1998

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